DS02 Night of the Dragonstar

by David Bischoff

“Are you sure you won’t stay for lunch? My servo-kitchens are preparing a wonderful lunch of vitamin-paks and pureed fruits. But I’m sure we could dig up a hamburger for a red-blooded astronaut like yourself.”

  “I appreciate the offer, Doctor, but I have a previous engagement. Thank you just the same.” Phineas realized that he had suddenly had quite enough, thank you, of Long Jack Neville.

  The writer was struggling to his feet once again. “All right, then. I know a busy man when I see one. But at least I can give you a copy of my newest novel, The Robots of Sphereworld.”

  Before Phineas could reply, Neville was moving across the room to an immense series of glass-fronted bookshelves. He pressed a button, one of the segments slid open, and the shelf slid forward. The writer reached up and pulled a hardcover book down from the shelf and handed it to Kemp, who noticed that the cover illustration was garish and brightly colored.

  “Here you are, Colonel. And if you’ll notice, it’s already autographed for your convenience, and mine.

  Phineas could not resist opening the book to the first page, which was inscribed in a bold but spidery hand:

  To My Good Friend, Best Wishes,

  Long Jack Neville

  Interesting that we’ve become such good friends so quickly, Phineas thought.

  “Why, thank you, sir. I’ll read this on my way back to Vandenberg. And now, I’m afraid I must be going. Ms. Wilkins, here is a card with the coded exchange for Vandenberg. Call when you’re ready to depart, and they’ll scramble up a limo-jet for you.”

  The nurse took the card and nodded as she escorted Phineas from the room and down the hall. He could hear the shambling footsteps of Neville close behind. When they reached the sliding glass doors of the lower deck, Phineas shook the author’s hand, waved politely to his nurse, and moved to his vehicle.

  God, it was good to get out of there. Almost a hundred years old and getting more senile by the minute. How in hell did he still write coherent books? He must have periods of lucidity followed by mental lapses when his thoughts went banging around like Ping-Pong balls in a vacuum chamber.

  Phineas exhaled slowly as he flipped on the electric engines of the Oldsmobile and eased down the driveway past the guardhouse. The Hardji warrior waved at him, and Phineas accelerated away from the zany place as quickly as he could.

  SO MUCH had happened since the first time Dr. Robert Jakes had stepped inside this place.

  He stood at the entrance to the aft section of the giant alien ship called the Dragonstar. When his team of IASA scientists had first found the entrance, it was disguised as part of a temple, which was overseen by the priest class of the Saurians.

  The Barrier, a great wall which the Saurians’ ancestors had constructed more than a thousand years earlier, separated their pre-electric culture from the wild jungle that occupied the majority of the immense cylinder’s interior. The Barrier also fenced in the control section of the Dragonstar—the end of the ship that housed the alien crew quarters, the ship’s great engines, and other command functions.

  The section in which Jakes and his team now worked and lived was in fact the heart of the Dragonstar. It was a vast area laced with corridors and shafts and honeycombed with cells and compartments, which to this day had not been completely investigated. Because of the immense size of the alien vessel, it might take years to fully discover all that might be contained within its myriad cells.

  And yet, in a surprisingly short time, Dr. Jakes and his team had been able to discover a significant number of facts about the ship, and some tenable theories to accompany the facts. First thought to be a specimen-collecting ship, the Dragonstar was soon discovered to be a seed ship: a gigantic star-faring life factory which possibly had moved from one stellar system to the next, seeding suitable planets with life forms which had been produced within the confines of the ship.

  It was Robert Jakes himself who had discovered the alien dioramas—great kinetic, three-dimensional displays that sensed the presence of intelligent brain activity and then began doling out information in visual displays. Jakes called them “teaching devices,” but their original function may have been something altogether different.

  Yes, thought the scientist, in the beginning this whole damned place was my playground—now I’ve got to share it with a whole army of others. C’est la vie.

  Indeed, there were now specialists in such diverse fields as paleontology, archeology, anthropology, biology, microbiology, and botany—as well as chemists, physicists, and engineers of all types swarming about the aft section like bees in a hive.

  This division of labor freed Jakes to conduct his investigations and experiments without trying to worry about other questions that might be outside his area of expertise.

  What most intrigued Jakes were the huge clusters of engines affixed to the rear of the giant cylinder. Each giant cone was more than a kilometer in length, and there were twelve clusters of ten cones in each. His initial assessment that these engines were of a conventional design and function was now under serious question, both by himself and his chief project assistant, Dr. Mishima Takamura. Although the engines seemed to be totally inert and incapable of function, Dr. Takamura’s people had been able to conduct some preliminary tests that indicated the possible existence of an interstellar drive.

  Faster than light. Every time Jakes considered the concept he felt chills up and down his spine. Logic told him that it was plainly impossible.

  But, of course, an alien ship 320 kilometers long and 65 kilometers in diameter was also an “impossibility,” until one showed up falling down the gravity well.

  Dr. Jakes was pulled from his thoughts by the approach of several technicians, who were riding in an electric van up a large ramp from the old Saurian temple. The van stopped beside Jakes, and a young woman climbed out. She was lean, blond, and pale. The name COWAN was stenciled on the breast pocket of her coveralls.

  “Excuse me, Dr. Jakes, I was wondering if you’ve got a minute,” the young woman said.

  “Sure, Angie.” Jakes smiled, wishing that he wasn’t feeling as old as his sixty-six years. “What can I do for you?”

  The woman hesitated for a second, then continued. “Well, it might not be anything, but I thought you might want to know about it anyway. Sam and I were down in the village this morning, and we saw a couple of the Saurians kind of ‘razz out,’ if you know what I mean. Really go nuts right in the middle of the outdoor marketplace. It took about twenty other guys to take ’em down. I think they had to kill one of them. It was pretty bad.”

  Jakes shrugged. “Well, I’m no expert on those kinds of things, but maybe it’s just part of that R-complex ritual that Captain Coopersmith observed.”

  Angie Cowan shook her head. “I don’t think so, Dr. Jakes. I’ve been up here with the Sauries for six months now, and I’ve seen the cycles they go through. They seem real prepared for them, what with the special tunics and all. It all seems pretty ordered. This was more like a ... like a psychotic episode, you know?”

  “All right, why don’t you make out a report and send it up to my lab. I’ll see that it gets to Dr. Lindstrom’s people. You never know, there might be something to it.”

  Angie Cowan smiled and moved back toward the van. “Thanks, Doctor. The whole thing was kind of upsetting, and I thought somebody ought to know about it. Catch you later.”

  Dr. Jakes waved as the van wheeled off, leaving him at the entrance to the aft section. He was due back at the laboratory for a meeting with Mishima, and he hated to be late for appointments.

  * * *

  The chief engineering labs had been set up in a large series of rooms adjacent to the section they called the engine rooms. It was the last series of cells before the superstructure of the engines themselves. The chief engineering labs represented the only area inside the Dragonstar in which Jakes and his people had tampered with the original equipm
ent. They had remodeled the area to suit their purpose of experimentation and testing. Portable power-paks, generators, racks of electronics, bubble chambers, control consoles, and recording gear filled every available space.

  This was the place where all the basic research was going on, and Jakes often said that if there were going to be any great breakthroughs on the many mysteries of the Dragonstar, most of them would begin in the lab.

  It was a quiet series of rooms. The staff went about their assignments determined to do the best they could under the circumstances. New equipment and gear were almost constantly being shuttled in, and with each passing week the research team became better armed in the battle against ignorance.

  The biggest problem, mused Jakes as he entered his office, a small area sealed off by portable screens, was attempting to contemplate the alien mind. Everything he and his people discovered on the monstrous ship would be interpreted through the human experience—and 90 percent of the time that interpretation would be wrong. The idea that you were dealing with a totally different way of looking at the universe took some getting used to.

  “Ah, there you are,” said a familiar voice, interrupting Jakes’s thoughts. Mishima Takamura stood at the doorway. Jakes removed his glasses and slowly massaged his temples. Glasses were an anachronism in the twenty-first century, but Jakes had been wearing them since he was five years old, and he felt absolutely naked without them. Besides, they made him look a bit eccentric, and he was so damned ordinary that he believed he needed something to make him stand out. At least this way he was always remembered as the guy with the glasses.

  Takamura took a chair opposite the desk. Jakes liked Mishima very much, and he was pleased when he had been able to pry the young physicist loose from his work at Caltech and bring him up here. Hundreds of physicists had applied to work on board the Dragonstar, but Takamura had been Jakes’s only choice as chief project assistant. Not only was Mishima brilliant, but he was a cultured man and a great conversationalist.

  “The esteemed Dr. Takamura,” Jakes said with a smile. “You’ve been leaving E-mail for me all over the place. What the hell can I do for you?”

  Takamura looked at him with his dark brown eyes, brushing his boyishly long hair away from his forehead. The young scientist had the good looks of a media star, but he never noticed how the women and some of the gay men seemed to be attracted to him.

  “I think we’ve found some new evidence to support Mac’s idea that maybe there is some kind of new radiation in the central chamber.”

  Jakes leaned forward, replacing his glasses on his seamed face. “Really? What kind of evidence?”

  “We’ve been doing a Sheffield Analysis on the VLF spectrum, and there’s something on the core graphs that has no known antecedents.”

  Jakes smiled. “Mishima, that hardly qualifies as evidence, does it? Sounds like just another mystery to add to the others.”

  “No, I don’t think so. Its presence is correlated to the other new activity the sensors have been picking up.”

  “You mean the tachyon pulse we received last month?” Jakes picked up a light-pen and began twiddling with it on the desktop.

  “Of course,” Takamura said. “It all makes sense, doesn’t it, Bob? When you and your team first entered the aft section, you found that burned-out transmitter, remember?”

  Jakes could only nod his head as his assistant continued.

  “You yourself theorized that it had been a tachyon message, a one-shot burst out into the galaxy telling the creators of this tub that we had finally arrived.”

  “That was just a theory. There was no way to test my assumptions. There still isn’t.”

  “No, but that big burst of nonrandom signal we intercepted last month was no accident. It was a tachyon pulse, and it was directed, and it was full of ordered phenomena. Bob you know in your heart of hearts that it was a message from Out There somewhere—a message that was received by this ship.”

  Jakes nodded slowly. His assistant was only verbalizing what he himself had been thinking for weeks. But after all they had been through, he had wanted to think it was all over, that from this point on it was simply going to be playtime for all the scientists excited with their new toy. Jakes didn’t want any more adventure, any more disruptive elements to wreck his plans for a quiet lifetime of new discovery.

  “I know, I know,” Jakes said. “But it just raises more questions. If this ship actually received a message from out there somewhere, that implies a few things that frankly scare me.”

  Takamura grinned. “You’re not alone in feeling that way. It means that the ship wasn’t dead in the water after all. It occurs to me that we may have been drawn into an elaborate kind of trap.”

  “Trap? Are you sure that’s the right word?”

  “I certainly hope it’s the wrong word, but I’m convinced that the ship received an answer to the pulse you detected leaving this ship when you first walked in the door.”

  “And of course this new VLF radiation is part of the whole involved story, right?”

  Mishima nodded. “I think we would be fools to ignore it. Something is going on here. Something we don’t yet understand.”

  “Damn! I wish Kemp were back up here. That fucking documentary has got him by the ass just when we need his input.”

  “I don’t see why Kemp is so necessary. I think we’d better inform the Joint Chiefs ASAP.”

  Jakes smiled. “Well, I think we should go through proper channels on the way. Kemp has got to be made aware of what we’re thinking before it gets spread all over the ship. How many of your people know about this?”

  “About the radiation? Just Mac and Greta. I told them to keep a lid on things for the time being.”

  “You’re convinced there’s nothing harmful?”

  The assistant shrugged. “I am convinced of nothing up here. That is always the best policy, don’t you think? But there’s more.”

  “What?”

  “I was down at the base camp in the interior yesterday, and I ran into Dr. Penovich. He was a teacher of mine in undergraduate school—it’s a small world, isn’t it? Anyway, he told me that the accident they had down there with one of the dinosaurs had some funny implications.”

  “Like what? Christ, this is starting to sound like a damned mystery novel.”

  “He told me that the beast that killed one of the servicemen was some kind of mutation. A herbivore that had acquired a taste for meat. Penovich also said that there was evidence of accelerated growth. Very accelerated.”

  “Listen, we don’t know anything about the biology of this place—it’s too early yet. We’re all just scratching the surface, and maybe we’re jumping to conclusions.” Jakes listened to himself talk and was embarrassed at how unconvincing he sounded.

  Mishima frowned. “If the biology of the ship behaves in a significantly different way than what we are accustomed to, then we must investigate it thoroughly. It means that we are dealing with something unpredictable and therefore unstable—and possibly dangerous.”

  Dr. Jakes nodded slowly, pretending to be casually digesting his assistant’s words. Actually, his mind was a jumble of chaotic thoughts. How the hell could they really know what was going on? How could they have assumed they knew everything after such a short time on board? All of a sudden everything seemed like it was on the verge of falling apart. He recalled the words of Angie Cowan earlier that morning and wondered if the incident with the Saurians had anything to do with Takamura’s VLF radiation.

  “Well, what do you think we should be doing?” Mishima asked.

  Jakes sighed audibly. “Christ-on-a-crutch, I don’t know. I really don’t know what to do. Kemp would blow his mind if we went over his head to the Joint Chiefs, though.”

  “Then let’s get in touch with Kemp now,” Mishima said.

  “That’s going to be tough.”
/>   “But not impossible, I presume.”

  Jakes smiled. “You know, Mishima, you drive a tough bargain. In fact, you’re no bargain at all. I have the feeling you’re going to stand here and bug the shit out of me till I call Colonel Kemp.”

  Dr. Takamura grinned and reached for the phone.

  “All right,” said Jakes, taking the receiver from his assistant’s hand. “Let’s see what’s going on.”

  He pushed through the preliminary clearance codes and waited for one of the functionaries on Copernicus to track Kemp down. He was in transit from Northern California by limo-jet to Vandenberg AFB. A few moments passed as the proper connections were made.

  “This is Colonel Kemp.” The voice of the Chief of Deep Space Operations sounded crisp in the receiver. There was the high-pitched whine of jet engines in the background.

  “Phineas, this is Bob Jakes.”

  “Jakes, what’re you doing calling me down here? I’m in the middle of a thousand and one things.”

  “We’ve been having some problems up here, Phineas, and I wanted to talk to you about them before we went any further.”

  “What kinds of problems?” Kemp’s voice was suddenly softer, more concerned.

  Jakes outlined the observations of Takamura’s team, the test results, and some of the theories that were beginning to take shape. He also threw in the incident with the Saurians and the death of one of Lindstrom’s team.

  There was a pause at the other end of the line as Kemp considered what he had heard.

  “Phineas, did you read me on all of that?”

  “Yes, darnit, I heard you Bob. What the hell is going on up there? Can’t you people get along without me for a couple of weeks?”

  “It’s been close to a month, Colonel, but that’s not the point. Some of my people are convinced that we’re dealing with some new developments that won’t wait. Mishima thinks the ship has received a transmission from the folks who made this lovely terrarium, and that’s the reason why we’ve been picking up some strange phenomena. Heaven knows what we may have missed.”